Dear community:
Below you will find the report of activities of December 2014 and January
2015 done by the volunteers of Wikimedia Mexico. Please don't hesitate to
get in touch with us if you require extra information about this activities
or only to make some suggestions.
The report is also available on Spanish and English in our wiki:
https://mx.wikimedia.org/wiki/Informes/Diciembre_2014
(December/Spanish)
https://mx.wikimedia.org/wiki/Informes/Diciembre_2014/en (December/English)
https://mx.wikimedia.org/wiki/Informes/Enero_2015 (January/Spanish)
https://mx.wikimedia.org/wiki/Informes/Enero_2015/en (January/English)
Greetings from the Wikimedia Mexico community.
On behalf
of
our chapter.
Carmen Alcázar (User:Wotancito)
WMMX Secretary.
==Journal December==
December 1
*Transmission of Möebius radio show: "From Hospital de la Castañeda to Pink
Floyd.
December 3
*Meeting with Archivo Tomás Montero A.C. towards a possible donation of
pictures as part of the Tlatelolco Cultural Centre.
*Backstage tour on the Fonoteca Nacional (National audio archive)
December 8
*Transmission of Möebius radio show: "From Jack Thomas Andraka to Cake"
==Journal
January
==
January 5
*
Transmission of Möebius radio show: "From Tres Tenores to Brazilian Girls"
January 10
*
Wikimedia Mexico Board meeting at Puebla.
January 12
*
Transmission of Möebius radio show: "From Ñusta to Michael Jackson"
January 15
*
Presentation of GLAM projects with Circuito Cultural Norte Chapultepec:
Museo de la Basílica de Guadalupe, Museo Casa Carranza, Museo de la Biblia,
Mapoteca Orozco y Berra, Museo Indígena, Museo de los Ferrocarrileros,
Museo Tecnológico de la CFE, Sala de Arte Público Siqueiros, Museo de
Antropología e Historia, Museo Casa de la Bola, Museo del Chocolate and
Museo Soumaya.
Following meeting with Cineteca Nacional for February 14th editathon.
Planning meeting about Wikipedia gender gap project with NGO partners:
Impetú, Social TIC, Mujeres Construyendo, Luchadoras TV and La Sandía
Digital.
January 20
*
Presentation of the GLAM projects to the Instituto Carlos Slim de la Salud
staff.
January 21
*"Creative Commons como alternativa autoral" talk by Iván Martínez in the
Seminario Permanente de Investigación-Producción en Arte y Diseño de la
Facultad de Arte y Diseño de la UNAM, session: “El problema de la
apropiación, el plagio y los derechos de autor en las artes visuales, el
diseño y la comunicación visual”. Centro Cultural Universitario Tlatelolco.
January 24
*
Monthly Wikipedia editing workshop, by Christian Cariño.
January 26
*
Transmission of Möebius radio show: "From JLo to Madonna"
*
Meeting with Luz María Silva, teacher from ITAM, about Wikipedia Education
Program
January 27
*
Meeting with Instituto de la Juventud de la Ciudad de México (Mexico City
Youth Institute) for their participation in the Wikimania 2015 Volunteer
Program.
*
Transmission of "Editatona" program in LuchadorasTV, RompevientoTV internet
television channel.
(http://rompevientotv.mediafire.com/?5nt81iuedc5d420)
January 31
*First ''Editatona'' editathon from
Gender Gap project. Instituto de Liderazgo Simone de Beauvoir, Mexico City.
Hello,
A quick reminder about Language Engineering team's monthly IRC office hour
thats happening later today at 1300 UTC on #wikimedia-office. Please see
below for the original announcement, local time, and agenda. We will post
logs on metawiki[1] after the event.
Thanks
Runa
[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/IRC_office_hours#Office_hour_logs
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Runa Bhattacharjee <rbhattacharjee(a)wikimedia.org>
Date: Fri, Feb 13, 2015 at 7:47 PM
Subject: [x-post] Language Engineering IRC Office Hour on 18 February 2015
(Wednesday) at 1300 UTC
To: MediaWiki internationalisation <mediawiki-i18n(a)lists.wikimedia.org>,
Wikimedia Mailing List <wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>, Wikimedia
developers <wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>, "Wikimedia & GLAM
collaboration [Public]" <glam(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
[X-posted announcement]
Hello,
The next monthly IRC office hour of the WMF Language Engineering team will
be on February 18, 2015 (Wednesday) at 1300 UTC on #wikimedia-office.
Please note that for this instance the session has been set to a much
earlier hour.
We will be taking questions and discussing about our ongoing projects,
particularly the recent activation of Content Translation as a beta feature
on several Wikipedias[1]. We’d love to hear comments, suggestions and any
feedback that will help us make this tool better.
Please see below to check local time and event details. Logs from our
earlier office hours are available at:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Language_Engineering
Thanks
Runa
[1] http://blog.wikimedia.org/2015/01/20/try-content-translation/
Monthly IRC Office Hour:
==================
# Date: February 18, 2015 (Wednesday)
# Time: 1300 UTC (Check local time:
http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?iso=20150218T1300)
# IRC channel: #wikimedia-office
# Agenda:
1. Ongoing projects - Content Translation beta feature
2. Q & A (Questions can be sent to me ahead of the event)
--
Language Engineering - Outreach and QA Coordinator
Wikimedia Foundation
--
Language Engineering - Outreach and QA Coordinator
Wikimedia Foundation
On Thu, Oct 9, 2014 at 10:26 AM, Pine W <wiki.pine(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm sure a Board member, Lila, or Erik will correct me if I am mistaken,
> but my understanding is that there is internal agreement at Board level
> that the Product side of the org needs some systemic changes, that Lila was
> chosen with the goal of making those changes, and that some changes are
> already happening.
There's agreement at all levels that we want to continue down the path
set by Sue back in 2012 [1] for WMF to truly understand itself as a
technology and grantmaking organization. That path led to where we are
today:
1) As part of the ED transition, Sue recommended (and the Board
accepted the recommendation) to seek an ED with a strong
technology/product background, and we hired Lila Tretikov as Sue's
successor who matches those requirements.
2) In November 2012, I recommended that we prepare for building out
new functions for UX and Analytics, and prepare for dedicated
leadership for Engineering and Product. Sue accepted this
recommendation. I hired Directors for UX and Analytics in 2013,
followed by Community Engagement in 2014, and finally we hired a VP
Engineering last week to complete the process.
3) To better account for the need to learn quickly and adjust course
as appropriate, we introduced quarterly reviews in December 2012 [3]
and increasingly reduced the specificity of Annual Plan level
commitments while increasing the focus on metrics and accountability
in the reviews.
4) On the technology and product front, many improvements to process
and support infrastructure have been implemented in the last couple of
years, including but not limited to:
- Development of MediaWiki Vagrant as a standardized dev environment,
to reduce failure cases due to developer environment inconsistencies
- Improvements to continuous integration infrastructure for PHP unit
tests and QUnit JavaScript unit tests, and increased focus (but not
nearly enough yet) on automated tests, especially for newly developed
features
- Introduction and continued improvement of BetaLabs as a staging
environment for all commits, increased use of automated end-to-end
browser tests and QA testing by humans to catch bugs and regressions
prior to production rollouts
- Introduction and use of various tools for measuring the impact of
features, including EventLogging as a standard instrumentation
framework for measuring feature usage, dashboards for visualizing
usage, WikiMetrics for analyzing editor cohort behavior, Editor
Engagement Vital Signs for understanding system-wide user behavior,
analysis of pageview data using Hadoop (just rolled out), etc.
- Highly specialized automated testing frameworks for specific
projects, e.g. Parsoid round-trip testing and visual diffing (!) to
detect dirty diffs or output problems
- Introduction of design research as a discipline in the UX team
(through hiring of Abbey Ripstra as User Research Lead) and
incorporation of user studies in a much more systematic way across
products
- Community liaisons dedicated to key products, responding to user
feedback and helping Product Managers understand more complex
community needs
- Continued shortening of release/deployment cycles; significant
improvements to deployment tooling, rewriting our legacy "scap" tools
to increase the ability to monitor and reason about deployments;
introduction of daily "SWAT" deploys to quickly release fixes, etc.
- Introduction of various infrastructure tools that help us better
analyze/profile issues, including logstash for log analysis, increased
use of graphite for performance metrics collection and various
front-ends for visualizing those metrics
- Shift towards loosely coupled services, addressing the difficulty of
maintaining and improving our highly monolithic codebase (examples
include Parsoid, Citoid, Mathoid, and the new Content API in
development)
- Introduction of Beta Features framework to stage features for early adopters
5) The changes Lila has pushed for since we started include:
- Greater focus on quarterly prioritization and a "rolling roadmap"
rather than a fiscal year view of the world
- Increased emphasis on understanding the needs of different user
personas at all cycles of software development, including through use
of qualitative and quantitative methods
- Reducing velocity of user-facing changes (esp. on desktop) to
increase focus on foundations (platform/process improvements) that
ultimately will enable us to move faster and more effectively
- Documenting product development methodology on-wiki and establishing
a clearer social contract (to reduce the reliance on RFCs/votes
regarding feature configurations)
- Surveying the needs of current users to more systematically balance
projects that serve future/new users vs. projects that serve the users
we have today
- Improved communication channels for community engagement to make it
easier to understand what major projects are currently in development
and how to provide feedback
This already means, effectively, that the commitments in the Annual
Plan developed during Sue's time should be taken with a big block of
salt at this point in time -- we're slowing down the deployment (not
development) of big user-facing features like Flow and VE as much as
needed to ensure that we incorporate user feedback, data and
qualitative research into the product development process
appropriately and spend sufficient time on the technical foundations
for these projects.
The quarterly prioritization alone has been, IMO, a huge improvement
that's already paying off. In the "Annual Plan" view of the world,
it's unlikely that we would have prioritized a project like HHVM the
way we did, because we were generally stuck on the priorities set for
the whole year. But it was very clear that this project would provide
huge benefits to our users, and I'm glad we were able to call it out
as _the_ top priority for Q1 and give the team the space to really
focus on getting it done (almost there now, starting to serve reader
traffic [4]).
Our draft Q2 top priorities (not yet posted on-wiki, but discussed in
the metrics meeting last week) are consistent with the above, with the
main user-facing push being on mobile web/apps and editing
performance, while the other priorities are more
platform/process-related. Once again, we're continuing to work on VE /
Flow, but focusing more on fundamentals (performance, architecture,
testing, use case analysis, etc.) than accelerating deployments.
My focus over the coming days is to flesh out the details for the Q2
priorities, and then shift to putting more effort in documenting and
refining product development methodologies and processes on-wiki. On
the engineering side, there's plenty of process/infrastructure
improvement to do as well. From my point of view, continued
improvement to test coverage and CI/testing infrastructure, developer
tools, profiling/instrumentation, staged roll-out support and
strengthening of architectural leadership are the big pieces for
coming months, but I'll let Damon speak to his focus areas as he gets
the lay of the land.
Erik
[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Sue_Gardner/Narrowing_focus
[2] https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2012-November/122663.html
[3] https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2012-December/123088.html
[4] https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/165004/
--
Erik Möller
VP of Product & Strategy, Wikimedia Foundation
Hi all,
during our last meeting the WMF Board started to discuss its composition
and how to ensure diversity and bringing in the necessary variety of voices
and minds to serve our mission and to support the Wikimedia Foundation.
We want to listen to your thoughts and ideas about Board composition before
we take the dicussion further with concrete bylaw changes. Please take a
look at
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Board_of_Trustees/Thin…
where you find our first thoughts and comment, amend and discuss.
This discussion is independent from the upcoming community election, which
will be prepared soon.
Regards
Alice.
--
Alice Wiegand
Board of Trustees
Wikimedia Foundation
Support Free Knowledge: https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate
Hi folks,
to increase accountability and create more opportunities for course
corrections and resourcing adjustments as necessary, Sue's asked me
and Howie Fung to set up a quarterly project evaluation process,
starting with our highest priority initiatives. These are, according
to Sue's narrowing focus recommendations which were approved by the
Board [1]:
- Visual Editor
- Mobile (mobile contributions + Wikipedia Zero)
- Editor Engagement (also known as the E2 and E3 teams)
- Funds Dissemination Committe and expanded grant-making capacity
I'm proposing the following initial schedule:
January:
- Editor Engagement Experiments
February:
- Visual Editor
- Mobile (Contribs + Zero)
March:
- Editor Engagement Features (Echo, Flow projects)
- Funds Dissemination Committee
We’ll try doing this on the same day or adjacent to the monthly
metrics meetings [2], since the team(s) will give a presentation on
their recent progress, which will help set some context that would
otherwise need to be covered in the quarterly review itself. This will
also create open opportunities for feedback and questions.
My goal is to do this in a manner where even though the quarterly
review meetings themselves are internal, the outcomes are captured as
meeting minutes and shared publicly, which is why I'm starting this
discussion on a public list as well. I've created a wiki page here
which we can use to discuss the concept further:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Metrics_and_activities_meetings/Quarterly_r…
The internal review will, at minimum, include:
Sue Gardner
myself
Howie Fung
Team members and relevant director(s)
Designated minute-taker
So for example, for Visual Editor, the review team would be the Visual
Editor / Parsoid teams, Sue, me, Howie, Terry, and a minute-taker.
I imagine the structure of the review roughly as follows, with a
duration of about 2 1/2 hours divided into 25-30 minute blocks:
- Brief team intro and recap of team's activities through the quarter,
compared with goals
- Drill into goals and targets: Did we achieve what we said we would?
- Review of challenges, blockers and successes
- Discussion of proposed changes (e.g. resourcing, targets) and other
action items
- Buffer time, debriefing
Once again, the primary purpose of these reviews is to create improved
structures for internal accountability, escalation points in cases
where serious changes are necessary, and transparency to the world.
In addition to these priority initiatives, my recommendation would be
to conduct quarterly reviews for any activity that requires more than
a set amount of resources (people/dollars). These additional reviews
may however be conducted in a more lightweight manner and internally
to the departments. We’re slowly getting into that habit in
engineering.
As we pilot this process, the format of the high priority reviews can
help inform and support reviews across the organization.
Feedback and questions are appreciated.
All best,
Erik
[1] https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Vote:Narrowing_Focus
[2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Metrics_and_activities_meetings
--
Erik Möller
VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation
Support Free Knowledge: https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate
Hi all,
There are online small business accounting software packages. Do any
thematic orgs have experience with them? Any recommendations? I am thinking
about proposing Quickbooks Online for the Cascadia user group, but as this
Forbes article says, there are competitors:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/quickerbettertech/2014/01/06/why-your-company-m…
Thanks,
Pine
Thanks for your feedback, MZ, Pine, Emily and John,
I’m glad to hear that you enjoyed this content collection about love.
We’ll review the impact of this curation experiment at the end of next week and share our findings afterwards.
I like Pine’s suggestion of hosting an office hours on this general topic. We’re planning a community outreach about the Wikimedia Blog next month, to learn how it and related media can best serve the needs of our movement. This seems like a good way to continue the conversation and I will propose a date here in coming weeks.
In the meantime, we welcome more feedback in the comments of this blog post:
https://blog.wikimedia.org/2015/02/13/love-on-the-wikis/
To be clear, when I asked ‘should we do this more often?’, I didn’t propose to restrict these experiments to just the topic of ‘love’. There are many other interesting topics for which we could surface great wiki content together: freedom, education, diversity or civility come to mind, for example. Or major news stories throughout the year. Other ideas welcome.
If these experiments turn out to be useful and cost-effective, we might consider hosting them monthly or quarterly, as needed.
Thanks again to everyone who participated in this quest for the many meanings of love.
I look forward to continuing this discussion in coming weeks. :)
Fabrice
>
> Date: Sun, 15 Feb 2015 09:09:55 +1100
> From: John Mark Vandenberg <jayvdb(a)gmail.com>
> To: Wikimedia Mailing List <wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
> Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Love on the wikis
> Message-ID:
> <CAO9U_Z7T-X1UKAW5pRj69RZ9jrZYeHOewFeCQBVq+uYjjsDc_A(a)mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
>
> On Sun, Feb 15, 2015 at 4:13 AM, Emily Blanchard
> <eblanchard(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
>> Thanks Fabrice! This is pure sweetness.
>>
>> St. Valentine's Day comes but once a year!
>
> Actually ...
>
> It is celebrated at different times in the year, in various parts of the world.
>
> And the Eastern Orthodox Church officially celebrates it twice. ;-)
>
> --
> John Vandenberg
>
> Date: Sat, 14 Feb 2015 09:13:14 -0800
> From: Emily Blanchard <eblanchard(a)wikimedia.org>
> To: Wikimedia Mailing List <wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
> Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Love on the wikis
> Message-ID: <7550866904249160570@unknownmsgid>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
>
> Thanks Fabrice! This is pure sweetness.
>
> St. Valentine's Day comes but once a year!
>
>
>
> Emily Blanchard
>
>> On Feb 13, 2015, at 9:38 PM, Pine W <wiki.pine(a)gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Thanks Fabrice.
>>
>> I would be interested in an office hour about social media strategy in
>> general. Do you think that an office hour could be arranged?
>>
>> The office hour discussion could inform future curations, as well as editor
>> engagement and reader engagement efforts.
>>
>> Thanks!
>> Pine
>>> On Feb 13, 2015 9:23 PM, "MZMcBride" <z(a)mzmcbride.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> Fabrice Florin wrote:
>>>> Many thanks to everyone who contributed to our community-curated love
>>>> collection! All your fine suggestions broadened our perspectives about
>>>> love. Together, we found some really well-written, factual and nuanced
>>>> articles, as well as many humorous, dramatic or beautiful images, which
>>>> gave us a better understanding about love and why it matters.
>>>
>>> Thanks for putting this together! I really like when we can highlight some
>>> of the beautiful content we have, particularly media on Commons. :-)
>>>
>>>> What do you think about this curation experiment?
>>>
>>> It's cute, but probably as a once a year kind of thing.
>>>
>>> MZMcBride
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>
> Date: Fri, 13 Feb 2015 18:14:31 -0800
> From: Fabrice Florin <fflorin(a)wikimedia.org>
> To: Wikimedia List <Wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
> Subject: [Wikimedia-l] Love on the wikis
> Message-ID: <21C17610-7315-431D-BC32-535BA91479F1(a)wikimedia.org>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8
>
> Hi folks,
>
> Just in time for Valentine’s Day, we’ve published two new stories on the Wikimedia Blog, for your enjoyment:
>
>
> Love on the wikis
> Here are our favorite articles and images about love, collectively hand-picked by community members.
>
> https://blog.wikimedia.org/2015/02/13/love-on-the-wikis/
>
>
> A WikiLove story
> How two Wikipedians fell in love while volunteering in Israel, thanks to a shared passion for knowledge.
>
> https://blog.wikimedia.org/2015/02/13/wikilove-story/
>
>
> Many thanks to everyone who contributed to our community-curated love collection! All your fine suggestions broadened our perspectives about love. Together, we found some really well-written, factual and nuanced articles, as well as many humorous, dramatic or beautiful images, which gave us a better understanding about love and why it matters.
>
> What do you think about this curation experiment? Did you learn anything new? Should we do it again? If so, what themes should we focus on next? Please chime in the comments of the first story above, with your ideas and suggestions.
>
> We hope that collaborations like these can help us discover new ways to share useful information, combining the wikis, our blog and social media.
>
> Thanks again for sharing the love — and Happy Valentine's Day to all Wikimedians!
>
>
> Fabrice
>
>
>
> _______________________________
>
> Fabrice Florin
> Movement Communications Manager
> Wikimedia Foundation
>
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Fabrice_Florin_(WMF)
>
First, thanks to John Vandenberg for considering co-mentoring the
accuracy review project for the Indonesian Wikipedia. I think he would
be an excellent co-mentor. But ideally I also hope to also obtain at
least one co-mentor from WMF engineering, design, or education
divisions, and a co-mentor from the WEF too, please:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Accuracy_review#Mentors_needed_.28at_least_t…
Oliver Keyes wrote:
>... the question Rachel [asked] was (to rephrase it):
> 'community people, what ideas do you have for better
> ways for us to communicate around software?'
> 'Work on my thing' does not answer that question.
Co-mentoring the accuracy review project is literally nothing but
communication. Community members ask for the Foundation's help all the
time. And even if the mentors end up helping with some of the code,
Rachel asked about interacting with the community, not just
communicating with it.
And it should not be "my thing" -- it is supposed to improve
wikipedias and similar references in all languages, by addressing
their primary existential crisis: more out of date content than
volunteer editors are willing or able to maintain. It's lucky that we
may be able do that with the side effect of creating the largest
automatic computer-aided instruction system ever, by several orders of
magnitude. But that's more than just I can possibly do just in my
spare time. It will have to be a community effort. The Foundation
can't directly sponsor content improvements, but creating a system to
support the community's efforts in that regard is fine. Assuming
everyone approves after testing, either Foundation could, if they
wanted to, cause it to be used in many ways which would not risk the
WMF's safe harbor provisions. That would be more difficult for the
community.
Furthermore, there was no way 2.5 years ago, when I was asking that
the Foundation pay market rate for technical staff to compete in
retaining and attracting the best and brightest, that I would have
known this would become a GSoC proposal under a new co-mentor
requirement today. So the insinuation that there is some kind of a
preconceived attempt at quid-pro-quo is absurd. There are some very
serious downsides to repeatedly being the only one opposed to
groupthink, and I have no regrets about bringing up the fact that I've
repeatedly had to deal with that kind of impediment to progress
without even a single word of thanks. I'm not asking for a medal, just
common courtesy. And maybe people who find themselves in situations
where they might be involved with groupthink mistakes should be a
little less harsh against those who are trying to fight such mistakes.
Our contemporary top-heavy economic predicament is the result of too
much groupthink leveraged by the sociopathic few, resulting in the
vast majority of consumers having lost ground during the current
economic expansion (e.g., as shown in
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/27/upshot/the-benefits-of-economic-expansion…
-- especially its graphs.) If there is a better example of
unsustainability, I would like to see it. Yes, I stick my neck out to
fight for people who are getting the short end of the stick, and
causing their own organizations, whether they be foundations or
nations, to be less effective because of it, and I'm proud I am one of
the very few who do.
On Saturday, 14 February 2015, James Salsman <jsalsman at gmail.com> wrote:
> Rachel diCerbo wrote:
> >...
> > Community Engagement is continuously considering effective ways of
> > interacting with you around product development and would love your
> > suggestions. What kinds of communications from WMF would you like to see?
>
> Please volunteer to co-mentor my GSoC proposal:
>
> http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Accuracy_review
>
> There is absolutely no way I can possibly do this without a co-mentor
> from the WMF or WEF. It's not a hard task, and one of the major
> benefits I just learned yesterday is a robust implementation of
> per-word text attribution, which amazingly still hasn't been available
> to the wider community in a way that handles reverted blanking and
> text moves since WikiTrust went offline. Maribel Acosta, Fabian
> Floeck, and Andriy Rodchenko did a suitable replacement algorithm in
> 2013, but it hasn't been folded back into the Wikimedia Utilities
> distribution....
>
> Best regards,
> James Salsman
